1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for migrating port-specific operating parameters during blade server failover.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Blade computers are increasingly being used to run critical applications that require a high level of redundancy and fault tolerance. Various clustering solutions exist such as VMware's high availability and Microsoft's clustering technology, but these systems are often complex and high priced. To provide redundancy and fault tolerance, a failing blade computer may be replaced automatically in process called blade failover. During such a blade failover, the failing blade computer's operating system is migrated from the failing blade computer to the replacement blade computer. The network infrastructure connecting the failing blade computer may include various port-specific operating parameters associated with a port on a network switch at which the failing blade computer is connected. Such port-specific operating parameters may include Quality of Service (‘QoS’) settings for Ethernet ports, Virtual Local Area Network (‘VLAN’) settings for Ethernet ports, N_port ID Virtualization (‘NPIV’) parameters for Fibre Channel ports, and others as will occur to those of skill in the art. These port-specific operating parameters also need to be migrated from the failing blade computer to the replacement blade computer during failover.